In the Coal Region, people are proud of where they live.
Road signs that lead to Kulpmont have a heart sticker next to the small borough's name.
"Kulpmont loves Kulpmont," said Greg Sacavage, the former athletic director at Mt. Carmel Area School District.
Among the typical concession stand foods seen at a football game, the Mt. Carmel Area Silver Bowl sells haluski, an ethnic dish that keeps the community connected to a large part of its heritage.
In Stephanie Niglio’s house, her Slovak and Italian heritage are evident with a sign in the kitchen that reads “mangia, mangia” and the smell of cabbage cooking on the stovetop.
When making haluski, Niglio loosely follows a recipe from a Slovak cookbook she bought from a church “somewhere in Western Pennsylvania.”
Her Italian mother learned to make the dish for her Slovak father.
“So we grew up eating haluski all the time,” Niglio said. “It was a good Friday thing because we always followed Lent.”
The meat-free dish is mainly made with cabbage and noodles of some kind. Immigrants from Poland, Slovakia and surrounding countries brought the recipe to the Coal Region.
The original recipe for “Repne Halušky” in the cookbook includes dumplings made with potatoes, eggs, flour and salt.
Niglio relies on a different way to make the dough component of the dish. She follows a recipe for “rivels,” which are made of eggs, flour and salt.
“That's what my mom always called them,” Niglio said.
After an online search, Niglio learned that rivels are the Pennsylvania Dutch version of a dumpling. They are made by dropping a small amount of dough into boiling water.
The dish is also commonly made with egg noodles or gnocchi, but the homemade method is preferred in this house.
"You gotta have the dough balls," Sacavage said. "Some people... they just put noodles and cabbage in a pan and they cook it with butter. They call it haluski, but it's not."
"That's just buttered noodles with cabbage," Niglio added.
"The secret to my recipe is I use sweet Hungarian paprika," Niglio said. "That's something my mother did, and I don't know why it's not called sweet Slovak paprika, but it's called sweet Hungarian paprika, and I actually buy it off Amazon.”
Sacavage stopped by the Niglio home for lunch donning a pin that reads "proud to be Slovak." Their families stayed connected to their heritage through the Slovak church in Mt. Carmel.
They both had parents who spoke Slovak and used to read a Slovak newspaper produced in Pennsylvania called the Jednota.
"The front part of it was in English, and the back part of it was in Slovak till you met to the middle," Sacavage said. "It was all about Slovak news. And there would be a Slovak recipe in there."
"My mom got that for years, and when she passed away, unfortunately, so did the subscription," he continued.
When they were growing up, many of the local churches had a strong connection to one ethnicity.
"All the local churches make haluski," Niglio said.
The dish, Sacavage said, became a staple because of the availability of its ingredients.
"Haluski was one of those ways that the Slovaks and those people in Eastern Europe got together. And meat was expensive in the old country, you didn't see a lot of meat," he explained. "Cabbage and dough for the Slovaks and the Polish and the Lithuanian and that, went a long way. It was a lot like, example would be like the Italians with spaghetti sauce."
Haluski
Ingredients
- 1 head of green cabbage
- 1 white onion
- 3 cups flour
- 3 eggs
- salt & pepper, to taste
- sweet Hungarian paprika, to taste
- 4 tablespoons butter
Instructions
1. Dice onion and sauté in a pan with butter. Add the cabbage, and cook until softened, but don't let it brown. Leave the lid on with the heat on low.
2. Make the dough for the rivels by mixing 1 cup flour for every egg. Add salt to taste and water to get it to the desired consistency, not too sticky.
3. Boil a pot of water. Scoop small amounts of the dough with a spoon and use a butter knife to scrape it into the pot. Boil for 20 minutes, then drain and rinse with cold water.
4. Add the dumplings (or egg noodles) into the pot. Season with salt, pepper and sweet Hungarian paprika.
